As a father, husband, teacher, coach, man, writer, jack Lutheran, late-mid-life-elder, ne'er do well, and espresso addict I find myself tethered to more responsibility, commitment, and distraction than, as a younger man, I thought I would carry. So I write this wonderfully encumbered surprise of a life that I have been given. I see grace and I see atrocity; I respond writing odes to what I love and rants against what I abhor. If I lived in a cave I would paint these on the wall.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Transitions, Fear, Longing (A Meditation)

While Megan was doing a job interview yesterday afternoon, I was in an English Department meeting. Megan's job would take her three hundred miles north into New Mexico. The departmental move to new college would mean new work for me. She will move. I will be here, at least for a while.

The details are myriad and complicated. Suffice it say that this is one of the big, honkin', growth spurts that humans go through. Sometimes, most times, in my case, I just survive. This time I want to meet it, feel it, make it deliberate, make it my own, remember it when I die.

A new path waits for each of us, for both of us. The particulars are not clear, and the uncertainty fuels anxiety, lots of anxiety.

In the meantime, we have work to do. Between teaching, building, kids graduating, and bodies declining, I feel lost and tossed on a sea way beyond my control or comprehension.

Yes, I know that control is an illusion, a fallacy, a construction of mind that keeps us from going crazy when confronting a constantly shifting reality. But I have to say that I want that illusion.

I want something to cling to, a raft of familiarity, of comfort.

Aint gonna happen. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I also want the full frontal zing of this moment, with all the fear, intensity, excitement, and urgency to respond.

I have to think, but I also have to surrender to currents of chaos. Part of me doesn't want to think, to take responsibility for being pro active, for learning, for adapting. You might say I avoid pain as a default SOP (standard operating procedure). Having some addictive and OCD tendencies, I have "medicated" with various substances, mood altering behaviors, and obsessive patterns to stay away from the pain. This coping strategies have worked for me, but are in my way now.

In addition to the external changes, I have some internal changes to make as well. Damn.

I need part of me that I abandoned a long time ago. This is the part of me that plans, that balances his checkbook, that prioritizes, that steps up and into the wind when it is time to adapt and change. That part has gone off to some distant forest of the mind, long ago exiled when I decided I wanted the world to take care of me, rather than assume responsibility for taking care of the world, or myself.

Where are you, lost and exiled accountant/project manager/detail oriented/deliberative/leader/king?

I need you now. It's time to come home.

These moments early in the morning, just past the edges of sleep, cut a clean, sharp focus on what is. Before I can crank up the spinning illusions, I see what is really before me, the inevitability of my life, what I have taken on, where I need to go.

About Me

Poems and narrative essays function in ways other kinds of writing cannot. They are living things that raise the heart rate while raising questions. Not all delight, but most can kick. I toss these out there into the cyber ethers, the e-oceans, with hope that they are found and heard by someone somewhere.